Blair Gets Religion

Jim Blair found many passions in life including God.

“I was a teenaged kid baptized in one of those emotional revivals at the First Baptist Church [in Fayetteville],” he said.

When Blair was 13, the congregation was in turmoil trying to decide whether to fire the preacher.

“I went down and took the microphone and told them how unchristian they were being,” Blair remembers.

From that moment on, he was an important figure in the church. By the age of 18, he was an ordained Baptist minister traveling to small country churches to preach when the regular minister was out of town.

As the story goes, Blair had a flair for biblical oratory. His sermons supposedly brought the Spirit into the sanctuary where it dropped the repentant to their knees and to God.

But Blair plays down that part of his life.

“I think that story is getting better with time,” he said. “I bought a shelf full of religion books and plagiarized shamelessly to give three sermons a week and ultimately accidentally became a bit of a theologian.”

Blair broke with the Baptist Church in 1957 because the church refused to stand up for integration.

“I still to this day can not excuse their failure to be a leader in the Civil Rights movement,” he said.

To read more about Jim Blair, click here.